Sorry
by templremus1990
Summary: A look at the darker side of the Tenth Doctor. The Doctor reflects on those he couldn't save. References to the whole of series two including Runaway Bride, and involving Martha. Set at the end of the Doctor's tenth life. Not all angst, though...


**Sorry**

"…I'm so sorry."

The words are tarnished now from overuse, bitter and metallic in his mouth. Sometimes he thinks they are all he has left, a shell of emotions he can no longer feel because if he did they would destroy him. So the words become his shield, his protection from himself, and that way, just for an instant, he doesn't have to think, doesn't have to hurt.

But it's never enough. How could it possibly be enough?

He'd like to imagine it gets harder every time, but it doesn't. It gets easier, and some days the words mean nothing any more, but he says them anyway, because he's the Doctor, and keeping quiet has never been his forte. It's much easier to talk than to look back.

They revisit him at the oddest moments, from the small, dark corners of his mind that he refuses to forget for fear of what he might become. Sometimes they barely register until later, like the moment when he called to a shrill-voiced bride 'Who are you marrying?' and the name 'Sally' flickered across his consciousness. It was only alone, in the living emptiness of his ship, that he remembered watching the spark of life inside that cold metal cyber-suit go out. Other times they are so near he has to close his eyes in case they might be standing in front of him again, but it never works. They come anyway, and he only has the same words for them, but they are silent. It is their silence that damns him most of all.

"_He deserved it."_

_He looks at her, and he knows she is lying, to herself as much as to him. The knowledge hurts him, and he is glad of that, because it means he is still alive, and when he had stood and watched the last empress of the Rachnoss burn with her children he had thought himself dead. She sees the lie too, and sighs. _

"_No he didn't."_

_**But he died anyway.**_

Afterwards he wonders how many of them did deserve it, truly deserve it, and he cannot find an answer. At night he is grateful for the hum of his ship, the quiet soothing sound that buzzes inside his head. It helps block the screaming from his dreams. He tells himself that he was spared the worst most of the time, didn't have to see them fall or feel their pain, and that this, at least, was a small mercy. But the screaming doesn't stop.

She looks so much like Adeola that at first he thought it really was her, and he had stepped into the timeline of someone who would soon be gone, killed by his own hands. But Martha is different; she survives. She takes it all in her stride, right down to the whole issue of physically-impossible blue boxes, which most people usually need a good few hours to truly get their head around. There are days when he looks at her and wonders how long he has left, how long before he has another person to be sorry for. But those days now are few and far between. She is a doctor of a different kind, used to facing death, and she helps him to stay and to look back all at once. She teaches him that to move on and to run away are not the same, and though he knew that already she makes him willing to acknowledge it.

"_I don't need anyone."_

"_Yes you do. Because sometimes, I think you need someone to stop you."_

In the end, she outlasts him. Sort of.

* * *

He has the feeling that his legs really shouldn't be this heavy. Or hanging at that kind of an angle, either, but he can't seem to find the strength to move them. Something wet and sticky prickles the back of his head, just below the point where the skull meets his spine, and when he opens his eyes he sees that Martha's hands are thick with his blood. Oh, right. That.

He doesn't remember telling her about regeneration- in fact, he doesn't remember much- but he supposes he must have done, because she somehow manages to drag him to the TARDIS and safely inside. He thinks he should probably be screaming in pain somewhere along the line, but everything seems strangely calm, almost disconnected, though his neck does ache quite a lot. Not a bad way to go, all things considered. For a bit, it is almost peaceful.

About the last thing he hears before every cell in his body explodes with a fire that both destroys and heals, ripping him open and rebuilding him in a moment that is so close to and yet so far from death, is her voice, laughing even as she cries.

"You'd better still know how to fly the TARDIS after all this, you stupid self-destructive git."

She tells him later, once he's recovered, that he didn't make much sense after that.

"You just kept saying the same thing, over and over. And then-"

He nods slightly, smiling, a less broad smile than his old one, but no less warm. That much, at least, he recalls.

_Now it hurts. The fire starts all along his spine and consumes him from the inside out. His whole body convulses as his senses are stripped away. He no longer knows what it is to see, to feel, to live. He only knows the burning. Then every memory of his tenth self tears into him like a million needle-points of consciousness, and they are back. _

_Magpie is blown apart in a flare of lightning._

_Adeola screams at she slumps lifeless at her desk._

_Sir Robert's yells accompany the sound of rending flesh. _

_The President crumples under a metal hold. _

_Mrs Moore is taken._

_Lance falls. Scooti drifts._

_He knows them all, has lived with them all. _

_There are no words now. None are needed. He watches them die, and he is sorry, he is so, so sorry. They know. He knows. And then, at last, they are gone. _


End file.
